Lewis Clareburt will carry Kiwi medal hopes to Paris next year. Photo / Photosport
Lewis Clareburt will carry Kiwi medal hopes to Paris next year. Photo / Photosport
OPINION
It’s a bit of a wonder Olympic swimmer Lewis Clareburt, one of New Zealand’s finest medal hopes at next year’s Paris games, is ranked as highly in the world as he is.
This week Clareburt, 24, decided to leave Wellington to train in Auckland, laying bare atale of bureaucracy and frustration – and the distinct feeling a certain pool in Wellington will be hoping Clareburt performs well, or it may suffer from some rippling backwash.
The Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre, known by the unlovely acronym WRAC, appears to have been wracking overseers of its 50m pool – the only one in Wellington – where Clareburt has previously trained before repeated frustrations over swim times and lane space became too much.
This is a world-ranked swimmer, remember, one of the planet’s best 400m individual medley stars, the decathlon of the pool. In a situation that is regrettably still occurring in our small, infrastructurally underfunded country, Clareburt found himself coming second to WRAC’s need to put the community first. There can be no argument about priorities – it’s a ratepayer-funded pool. But, seriously, was there really no way WRAC could have organised matters so one of the world’s top swimmers wasn’t being given short notice that he couldn’t train there and, even when he did, had to dodge aquafitness classes and public swimmers?
Clareburt’s frustration apparently boiled over after regular lane space issues caused a strained relationship with WRAC staff, ending with unexpected WRAC restrictions on his camera use for his social media followers and a request to remove gear bags.
This wasn’t some self-obsessed Gen Z kiddo doing look-at-me Instagramming. Filming is needed for stroke and speed analysis and the social media is designed for sponsors, funders and to keep the sport in front of the next generation of international hopefuls.
So how hard can it really be to accommodate a world-ranked swimmer? I suspect Michael Phelps, the winner of 23 Olympic swimming gold medals (including several 400m medley golds), never had to train in a public pool.
Former Olympic swimmer and world champion short-course swimmer Moss Burmester told the Herald over a year ago that Clareburt’s battle for training space in crowded lanes was even tougher for a butterfly swimmer (his main stroke), because of their wider wing spans.
“It is always difficult in a public pool because under bylaws there has to be a certain amount of public access, which is fine because ratepayers are paying,” said Burmester. “He’s in a… lane with six swimmers which is not ideal … similar to when I was growing up. You are constantly giving way.”
Clareburt’s frustration was stoked several times when 50m lane bookings were cancelled or altered at short notice and, on at least one occasion, he couldn’t even find space to swim at Freyberg pool – a 33m facility. It’s preposterous stuff and has led to Clareburt leaving behind a close-knit support network of his coach, friends and family in Wellington.
Lewis Clareburt starred at the Commonwealth Games last year. Photo / Getty Images
That extended family is important to any swimmer, any athlete. Burmester said he was fortunate with help from family, friends and businesses in Tauranga during his career, who continued to back him when he shifted to Auckland’s high-performance swim facility. But Auckland was an even tougher place to survive, he said, because athletes did not have the familiar connections which can be so important.
While we’re at it, what was High Performance Sport NZ’s role in all this? It clearly had one and may well have been behind the Auckland move. But it couldn’t bend a council swimming pool to its will or find a way to compromise for the national good?
Clareburt clearly wants to improve. He burst onto the scene with an unexpected bronze medal at the 2019 world championships 400m medley. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, he set the second-fastest qualifying time, beating the eventual gold medallist, and led in the gold medal race before fading to a disappointing seventh in his first Olympic final.
He has February’s world championships in Doha to test his progress although his fastest time this year (4m 11.29s) is well below his best of 4m 8.70s, posted when he won one of his two gold medals at last year’s Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
At present, his 4m 11.29s sees him ranked 10th in the world which (based on time alone) would see him outside the 400m medley final at next year’s Paris Olympics, although he has four Americans ahead of him (they only select two in each event except for the 100m and 200m freestyle).
One of the things I remember fondly in my two-year stint as a parliamentary press gallery reporter was an old saying that came to mind when I had to deal with the Wellington bureaucracy. Honore de Balzac: “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism run by pygmies.”
If Clareburt manages to get among the medals either in Doha or Paris, he will have done so by beating that giant mechanism. The pygmies, meanwhile, will be getting on with what is most important to all bureaucrats – the process, not the outcome.
Paul Lewis has been a journalist since the last ice age. Sport has been a lifetime pleasure and part of a professional career during which he has written four books, and covered Rugby World Cups, America’s Cups, Olympic and Commonwealth Games and more.
